The Taste of Time.

Today, on the ride to work, I was listening to Radio Lab's Season 1 show about Time. It's pretty interesting, chockful of interesting factoids about time. For example, did you know that it was the railroads that demanded a rigid time system in the mid 1890's? Apparently, times was pretty localized before that. (11:45am at the post office, but 12:05 at the bank and 11:30 at the local bar.) It wasn't until people needed to be "on time" to catch their trains, that the railroad stepped in and enforced local legislature to declare an official time. Which everyone else eventually got in line with.

Another interesting bit of chronological trivia was the "Tasting Clock".

Before there were illuminated clocks, in a time when most sleepers had very little light in their bedrooms at all, clever Victorians came up with the idea of the "tasting clock".

The idea behind it was that it would have covered capsules on the clock that would open at set time during the night. Inside each capsule was a different spice. A sleeper, who woke up and wanted to know what time it was, would merely lick their finger and run it across the top of the clock. When they came to an open capsule, they would insert their finger and get a portion of spice on it. They would then suck on their finger and what they tasted, told them what time it was.

If you got Cinnamon, it was 2am.
If you got Chocolate, it was 4am.
If you got Sugar, it was 6am. (And nearly sunrise.)

In ingenious solution to a problem that localized electrical illumination would eventually make obsolete.

Clever Victorians.
They knew what time "tasted" like.

Cheers,
Mr.B